Space Case

Classical Mechanics Level 1

On your mission through space, the computer has woken you up from hypersleep. The ship's battery is reaching a critically low level, and to make matters worse, the artificial gravity is not working!

You need to locate the new battery out of the 5 boxes in front of you. Each one looks identical but only one of them contains the battery, which has a greater mass than the others. You can't open the boxes as the radiation would kill you.

How can you determine which box contains the cell?

Push each box with roughly the same force, and the one which accelerates the least contains the cell Spin each box, and the one that stops spinning first contains the cell Drop each box, and the one that takes the longest to hit the ground contains the cell Drop each box, and the one that takes the least time to hit the ground contains the cell Hold each box in your hand, and whichever feels the heaviest contains the cell

View wiki
William Whitehouse by William Whitehouse , 22, United Kingdom

This section requires Javascript.
You are seeing this because something didn't load right. We suggest you, (a) try refreshing the page, (b) enabling javascript if it is disabled on your browser and, finally, (c) loading the non-javascript version of this page . We're sorry about the hassle.

3 solutions

The idea relies on inertia: While none of the boxes will have any (apparent) weight, they will still have the inertia so the heavier box will require more force to accelerate.

The (apparent) weight is the force due to gravity and since there is no gravity here nothing has weight, even though they do have mass.

7 Helpful 0 Interesting 0 Brilliant 0 Confused
Nick Schreiner
Nov 18, 2016

F=ma, so if force is constant then a larger mass results in smaller acceleration.

Options 1+5 rely on the box falling, which won't happen without gravity.

Things only feel heavy because of gravity, so 2 is out.

And a spinning box will be stopped through friction. If all boxes are spun with the same speed, the heaviest box will take the longest to stop as it requires the most collisions with the air molecules. Of course this will take a rather long time, and the battery will be long depleted by then.

So 3 is the only possible choice.

4 Helpful 0 Interesting 0 Brilliant 0 Confused
Theodore Lietz
Nov 19, 2016

BILL NYE THE SCIENCE GUY. Bill bill bill bill bill. Bill Nye the science guy. Bill Nye the science guy

2 Helpful 0 Interesting 0 Brilliant 0 Confused

0 pending reports

×

Problem Loading...

Note Loading...

Set Loading...